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	Cullen: the Church Can't Bury the Truth By Kevin Cullen The Statesman April 13, 2010 http://www.statesman.com/opinion/cullen-the-church-cant-bury-the-truth-560735.html It's doubtful the mandarins at the Vatican are shaking in their boots, now that a simple parish priest in Massachusetts has stood in the pulpit and called for Pope Benedict's resignation. But I wouldn't bet against Father Jim Scahill. When it comes to going after peers who do the wrong thing, he's two for two. He has taken on and taken out a priest and a bishop, so it could be that a pope is the next logical step. Logic is not an attribute that Scahill's critics — many of them fellow priests — often ascribe to him. But his theological approach during 36 years as a priest, and especially as a conscience for a church whose leaders had none when it came to the abuse of young people, has been perfectly logical. Eight years ago, after he became pastor of St. Michael's in East Longmeadow, Mass., Scahill started withholding the 6 percent cut the Diocese of Springfield received from the weekly collection basket until the diocese stopped supporting a pedophile named Richard Lavigne who happened to be a priest. Scahill ministered to some of Lavigne's victims and his argument was perfectly logical: He didn't want any of his parish's money subsidizing a priest who should have been dismissed. When Bishop Thomas Dupre continued to protect Lavigne, Scahill went after Dupre, logically concluding that Dupre was an enabler. Turns out Dupre was also an abuser, and again it was Scahill who helped reveal that. Lavigne lost his pension and his collar, and Dupre resigned. If you listen to what Scahill has to say about the dilemma facing Pope Benedict XVI and the rest of the hierarchy, it's perfectly logical. Scahill says the pope and the bishops are in trouble because they never properly accounted for their behavior as enablers of abuse. And he's right. Why is anybody surprised the pope would be accused of covering up for or going easy on priests who raped kids when he was a bishop? Protecting the church's reputation at the expense of young people's souls was official policy right up until the whole thing blew up, in Boston, eight years ago. These cases will continue to surface, not because Scahill is a loose cannon, or because of some left-wing secular conspiracy to ruin the church, as has been suggested by certain clerics in Rome who compared the savaging of the pope's reputation to the suffering of Christ on the cross or Jews during the Holocaust. These cases will continue to surface because the Vatican never confronted the reality that its managers, its bishops, enabled thousands and thousands of kids to be raped and abused by predatory priests. The enablers were never disciplined, never held accountable, never made to pay close to the price they should have for the pain they inflicted on so many innocent lives, and so the outrageous cases such as the ones in Wisconsin and California and Germany and Ireland and Italy will continue to surface, because you can't bury the truth forever. It has become fashionable to fire all the teachers at bad schools. The church never considered firing all the enablers, because if they did, there wouldn't be a church. Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law was the only American bishop who lost his job because of his complicity. And his "punishment" was a nice sinecure in Rome, where he is treated like the prince of the church he remains, and where he continues to pick new bishops. How's that for making him pay? You have to wonder if Scahill, a good priest, will suffer far more than Bernie Law, a bad bishop, for having the temerity to point out all that hypocrisy. If Scahill's worried, he's not showing it. And he'd be glad to talk this over with his bosses. "I heard from ‘Good Morning America.' I heard from CNN," Scahill told me. "I haven't heard from the Vatican. Or my bishop."
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